1.  TOPO Distillery & spirits.  Some local bloggers, Tom & I were treated to a tour & tasting at TOPO Distillery last Friday night.  I’ve been very familiar with Top of the Hill, having spent a good chunk of my meager college income there on Thursday nights, but first came across TOPO spirits at a Halloween party this past October.  There was a bottle of TOPO vodka on the kitchen island & I was intrigued, but didn’t know the owners of the house well enough to clap my hands & yell “Open it!  Open it!” like I wanted to, so I was thrilled that The Gourmez arranged this visit to the distillery for us.

TOPO currently produces 100% local & organic Vodka & Carolina Whiskey.  The Piedmont Gin is organic & 99.6% local…it’s hard to find a lot of organic juniper berries in this area.

We tasted the TOPO Vodka side by side with against a popular top shelf vodka, & the TOPO Vodka was so much less harsh, with floral notes & buttercream flavors…never done a side by side liquor tasting before.  We bought a bottle of TOPO the very next day.

The Piedmont Gin is fantastic.

We did a side by side white whiskey tasting, too.  While the TOPO white whiskey was preferred by most everyone over the top shelf brand, there is no doubt the aged version was much, much more desirable.

for more info be sure to check out The Gourmez‘s recap of the evening, or if you’re local, get over to the distillery yourself!  

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2.  Reruns of No Reservations on Amazon Prime.  I’ve been sick this week & there has been nothing good on TV.  Watching Anthony Bourdain eat & drink himself silly, while I could taste absolutely nothing, tortured me a little, but kept me thoroughly entertained.

3.  Whole Foods frozen fruit bars.  I can’t find a good link, but head straight to the frozen dessert aisle of Whole Foods.  Strawberry & Caribbean Mix are our favorite flavors.

4.  Z-pak.  Thanks to this, I finally feel human again.

5.  Sourfest @ Busy Bee Cafe.  Our favorite beer bar filled it’s draft lines with all kinds of tart, funky & sour goodness.  We shared Petrus Aged Red, Big Boss’s Funk Operator, Liefmans Goudenband, Dr. Fritz Briem’s 1809 Berliner Weisse, a complimentary taste of Cantillon’s Classic Gueze (phenomenal), then continued the Sourfest at home, breaking open our cellar for a Russian River Supplication & Founder’s Rübæus.

Happy weekend, everyone!